高级医学英语阅读与写作Chapter Five
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Faulty: My father neither asked for advice nor did he need it.
Corrected with parallelism: My father neither asked for advice nor needed it.                                              (two predicates)
Corrected by eliminating the need for parallelism: My father did not ask for advice, nor did he need it. 
                                                                 (two coordinate clauses)
Faulty: This experience made people begin to think not only realistically but it turned them into thinking with an imagination.
Corrected with parallelism: This experience made people begin to think not only realistically but also imaginatively.                                                                                 (two adverbials)
Corrected by eliminating the need for parallelism: This experience made people begin to think more realistically; it also fired their imagination.                                                          (two coordinate clauses)
 
        To improve your writing style, use parallelism wherever it serves to emphasize a similarity or a contrast and wherever it is required, but avoid faulty parallelism.
 
III.   Variety
 
A careful writer usually tries for sentence variety. “Sentence variety” in writing means frequent change of sentence order, form, structure or location to prevent an essay from being stilted, or monotonous. There are several workable ways of achieving variety.
 
            1. Changing the word order of a sentence: One way of achieving variety is placing words, phrases and clauses at the beginning of a sentence so that the usual word order of subject-verb (object)-modifier is avoided. Since the word order is relatively fixed in English, most of the shifting must occur with adverbial elements. e.g.
 
            Presley horrified adult America of course.
            Of course Presley horrified adult America.
 
               Like all artists, these rock musicians mirror feeling and beliefs that help us see and form our own.
These rock musicians, like all artists, mirror feeling and beliefs that help us see and form our own.
 
An Italian named Leonardo da Vinci had designed flying machines as earlyas the fifteenth century.
As early as the fifteenth century, an Italian named Leonardo da Vinci had designed flying machines.
 
     2. Frequent transformation of sentence structures: Sentence structures are often mutually transformed from clauses to their related reduced structures: noun clauses — reduced noun phrases, attributive clauses — reduced attributive phrases, adverbial clauses — reduced adverbial phrases. e.g.
 
            What I said is true.
            My words are true.
 
            The doctor arrived early. This pleased the nurse.
            The doctor's early arrival pleased the nurse.
 
            I know the girl who is talking with the gentleman.
            I know the girl talking with the gentleman.
 
                   As it was built in 1958, the bridge brought a great change in the city.
            Built in 1958, the bridge brought a great change in the city.
 
        Of course there are other ways of achieving variety, such as change of voices, change of tenses, use of synonyms or identical words, careful variety in the length of a paragraph, etc. These changes are technically made to make a paragraph or a composition attractive, interesting and fresh and to avoid stiffness and monotony. But remember that variety is not to be sought for its own sake. It's the content that determines the forms.
 
IV.Reading practice
     
Read the following paragraphs and make a careful analysis of their unity, coherence, variety and other techniques of effective writing .
 
     Passage 1
 
    This is the essence of the religious spirit — the sense of power, beauty, greatness, truth infinitely beyond one's own reach, but infinitely to be aspired to. It invests men with a pride in a purpose and with humility in accomplishment. It is the source of all true tolerance, for in its light all men see other men as they see themselves, as being capable of being more than they are, and yet falling short, inevitably, of what they can imagine human opportunities to be. It is the supporter of human dignity and pride and the dissolver of vanity. And it is the very creator of the scientific spirit; for without the aspiration to understand and control the miracle of life, no man would have sweated in a laboratory or tortured his brain in the exquisite search after truth.
                ―Dorothy Thompson, “The Education of the Heart”
 
 
     Topic sentence:  _____________________________________________
                                 _____________________________________________
 
     Supporting sentences:
            1.
            2.
            3.
            4.
 
 Devices for coherence:
 
 
     Passage 2
 
                                   I Have a Dream
 
So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed... that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood...
                   I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!
                                   ―Martin Luther King, Jr . Washington, D.C. 1963
 
 
     Topic sentence:  ______________________________________________
                                 ______________________________________________
 
     Supporting sentences:
            1.
            2.
            3.
 
 Devices for coherence:
 
 
     Passage 3
 
  Much is said about the pain of growing up in poverty, but not much about the pain of growing up rich. My wealthy family never had to worry about a lack of material possessions. Growing up in this environment, especially as a woman, was a deadening experience. Because she had money, Mom hired other people to live for her: to take care of her children, to wash the clothes, to clean the house. She hated herself. There was nothing for her to be except a social ornament for Dad to introduce to his business friends. She never had a job -- didn't know how to go about getting a job, didn't even consider that she was capable of working or of supporting herself.
                           — Anonymous letter to Ms. magazine
 
 
     Topic sentence:  ____________________________________________
                                 ____________________________________________
 
     Supporting sentences:
            1.
            2.
            3.
            4.
 
     Devices for coherence and variety:
 
 
 
     Passage 4
 
                                          Outdoors
 
Outdoors, as we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody uses too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing --unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one's own kin outdoors -- that was criminal.
                                                 — Toni Morrison, “The Bluest Eye”
 
 
     Topic sentence: _______________________________________
                             ________________________________________
 
     Devices for coherence and variety:

V. Writing assignments
 
     For these writing assignments, follow the writing process described in Chapter 1, including the revision step. Bear in mind your audience and purpose.
 
Exercise 5 -1
     ____________________________________________________________
 
1. Develop the following topics into single paragraphs of approximately 80 words each, use devices of paragraph development (described in Chapter 2) to achieve paragraph unity
                          
* Health Helps You Succeed
* The Value of Books
* My View on Motives
* Are Some People Born Clever, and Others Born Stupid?
My View on Opportunity
Ways of Getting Knowledge
Life on the Campus
How to Give a Good Speech
 
2. Write effectively on the following topics, make your writing coherent by using the devices you’ve learnt in this chapter.
 
* How to Keep Fit
* Happiness
* Global Awareness of Grain Shortage
* Dangers from Air pollution
Information and My Life
Traveling
Beijing Opera ― The Traditional Culture
Fast Food
 
3. Write effectively on the following topics , try out the devices described in this chapter to achieve sentence variety.
 
* Modesty
* Good Manners
* Planes
* Animals Need Protection
Changes Brought by Science
College is a Waste of Time and Energy
Ways people Spend Leisure Time
Collage is a Waste of Time and Money
 
     Exercise 5 -2  Revision
     ___________________________________________________________
 
         Revise for unity, coherence and variety the compositions you have written since the beginning of the course and make them more effective and beautiful.
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